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Babybook

Now that I’m 22 and an “adult” my Facebook timeline becomes more and more filled with pictures of growing baby bumps and then growing babies. I swear everyday I see a new person announcing a pregnancy or welcoming their new child. Every. Single. Day.

So needless to say, I am less than enthused about Facebook’s launch of their new Scrapbook feature. Scrapbook “lets you create a photo tag for your child even if he or she isn’t on Facebook and then create a Facebook album of the photos in which he or she is tagged.” And when they’re old enough to have their own Facebook (aka 13) they will be able to transfer all of these images over to their profile.

I’ve always thought the “Born” feature on every person’s profile timeline was odd, but I think it’s even weirder now that it will actually serve a purpose in a few years when these Scrapbook-ed babies get their own profiles and have images spanning their entire lives.

Leave it to Facebook to find a way to get people to share even more personal data with them. Now people will be encouraged to share even more baby pictures under the guise of this ‘Scrapbook’ being a pseudo baby book. Which will not only clog up my timeline, but put the next generation at risk. These kids will likely have their own Facebook data profile before they are even allowed to be on the site. If Facebook doesn’t allow children below 13 to have their own profile they shouldn’t have the opportunity to collect data on young children.

This also sacrifices a child’s privacy at a very young age.Putting all of this information out there robs a child of the opportunity to make these decisions for themselves. You would think parents would want to protect their children from the internet invasion as long as they can, but now they’ll be broadcasting everything from day 1.

While I know parents share things on Facebook already, and I don’t see anything wrong with the occasional picture, I think the ability to culminate this information all in one place is very dangerous. By creating this Scrapbook parents are setting their children up for heightened privacy concerns in the future.